The communications industry is rapidly changing to adjust to emerging technologies and ever increasing customer demand. This customer demand for new applications and increased performance of existing applications is driving communications network and system providers to employ networks and systems having greater speed and capacity (e.g., greater bandwidth). In trying to achieve these goals, a common approach taken by many communications providers is to use packet switching technology.
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is used extensively in networks, such as the Internet, to reliably communicate information between devices. This reliability is based on the sender receiving acknowledgements from the receiver in response to successfully receiving packets. The performance of TCP also depends upon whether or not acknowledgements are received for sent packets. In response to an acknowledgment, the sender TCP slowly increases the rate at which it sends packets. Conversely, if the sender TCP does not receive such an acknowledgement for a sent packet, it decreases, such as by half, its rate of packet transmission based on the assumption that the packet was lost due to network congestion. Note, the sender TCP will continue slowly increasing its transmission rate of packets in response to receiving an acknowledgement of a sent packet.